Melanie Krüger M. Sc., Oldenburg
Video 7
“New tools for assessing subjective listening effort: Adaptive scaling and listening effort questionnaire”
In today’s communication society, understanding others in noisy environments is particularly import. Especially hearing impaired and elderly people report that additional effort is required for them to understand speech in these situations. Using the newly developed adaptive scaling method (Krüger, 2015; awarded the EUHA Sponsorship Award in 2015), listening effort can be measured individually over a wide SNR range in the lab. The subjects rate the perceived listening effort on a scale between “no effort” and “extreme effort”. Furthermore,
a questionnaire was drawn up to record the perceived listening effort in different acoustic everyday situations. This questionnaire was developed by several focus groups with hearing impaired subjects, in cooperation with experts from the field of audiology, and evaluated in an international multi-centre study. This talk is about the development of adaptive scaling and the questionnaire as well as about the evaluation data and its potential application possibilities.